The system is broken. The game is rigged. The only way forward is to stop. Forget protesting, arguing, or fighting back. These are distractions from the possibility of redefining freedom. Stop trying. Stop playing. Don’t pick up your ball and go home—leave it for others to squabble over and run!

Judith/Jack Halberstam[1] argues passionately for clear-eyed refusal as a personal, political, and creative action. So do the artists in No Name.

“Resistance takes the form of counterintuitive modes of knowing such as failure and stupidity,” writes Halbertstam in The Queer Art of Failure. “We might read failure, for example, as a refusal of mastery, a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit, and as a counterhegemonic discourse of losing. Stupidity could refer not simply to a lack of knowledge but to the limits of certain forms of knowing and certain ways of inhabiting structures of knowing.”

The artists in No Name refuse to be pinned down or labeled, and their work cannot be described coherently. Instead of paintings or sculpture they create gestures, memories, and detritus. The results refuse quotation marks, but demands air quotes—flimsy hatch marks made of helium or neon that may fly away, sizzle out or explode.